The Viper (Untamed Hearts #1)(4)
“It wasn’t his fault,” she said quickly to Sheriff Conner, wanting to get it out before the fire department showed up. “There was another car. This crazy woman swerved into his lane right as he was coming over the hill. None of this was his fault, Sheriff. It was just b-bad luck.”
“Okay, darling.” The sheriff squeezed her good hand. “Just focus on breathing easy and not moving until we can get you out. Can you do that?”
Katie took a deep breath and nodded. “Yeah, but about—” She paused, realizing she’d never asked his name. “The m-man out there.”
“Don’t you worry ’bout Marcos. He’s a big boy, and there’s not a scratch on him.” The sheriff squeezed her hand once more. “You’re the one we’re gonna focus on right now.”
“It was just bad luck,” she repeated, thinking of not just the accident, but a long string of rotten luck and getting the impression she wasn’t alone as she stared at the fighter again. “It wasn’t his fault.”
Rather than respond, the sheriff got out of the car to meet the fire truck that pulled up. Katie got the distinct impression the fighter, Marcos, was low on his priority list, but Katie still worried about him.
The entire time they worked at cutting her out of the mangled mess of her car, she thought of Marcos. She would look for him, her gaze searching the accident site when the fear or pain got too much. She’d usually find him standing out of the way with a brown blanket over his shoulders. She wished she could hold his hand again, but there were firefighters everywhere. Tommy, the paramedic, sat next to her taking her vitals, talking in that calming voice of his that made it obvious why he was good at what he did. He had put a brace around her neck. He was getting her ready for the stretcher as the horrible grinding of metal being cut away made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.
She was shaking. The shock was still clouding her brain. It blocked out some of the pain, but still she fought for clarity as the relief of finally being free made her vision haze. The world started to spin as they put her on a stretcher. Tommy had to take extra time with her arm, splinting it on a board. Katie didn’t have the nerve to look.
“I-I need the jacket,” she told them, knowing it had been tossed aside somewhere. She didn’t want it to end up at the tow yard. “P-please. I need to take it with me to the hospital.”
“Sure, darling.” Tommy gave her a warm smile that made more than a few Garnet women weak-kneed.
The paramedic was one of their most eligible bachelors, but Katie was still worried about her fighter. She breathed a sigh of relief when Tommy put the jacket over her as they wheeled her toward the ambulance. She was just starting to think everything might be all right when Sheriff Conner’s voice drifted over from the other side of the street.
“Have you been drinking tonight, Mr. Rivera?”
She wanted to scream at him to lie.
Instead she heard her fighter face it head-on. “Yeah, Sheriff, I had a few beers at midnight.”
She found herself staring at the roof of the ambulance before she could hear how it all played out. The sirens came to life. Tommy, the handsome paramedic, alternated between checking her vitals and writing things on his chart. All the while he laid on that charm he was famous for, obviously very accustomed to making horrible situations a little easier with the good looks God gave him.
Yet all she could think about was Marcos, the mystery fighter with kind eyes, dangerous tattoos, and a horrible case of bad luck almost as epic as hers.
Chapter Two
Miami
April 2014
The only good thing to come out of Marcos’s fated trip to Garnet County was getting out of that town without a DUI. Once the sheriff gave him the all clear, Marcos promptly headed back to Miami and attempted to forget everything about that week. To be safe, he went ahead and moved just in case the sheriff decided to change his mind and pin something on him.
Marcos’s past made him more than a little paranoid where the police were concerned. The old apartment had been a shithole anyway. Not that the next place was much of an improvement, but sometimes any change was good. A new place, a new job, a new cell number, a new life.
That had been his grand plan after his dreams of being a professional fighter had officially ended the moment he ran into Katie Foster. More than losing the fighter spot at the Cuthouse Cellar, it was the accident itself that disturbed him.
He remembered the young, pretty brunette with no small amount of regret. There was something about those wide, honey-colored eyes framed by long, tear soaked eyelashes that haunted him. Her hair was the same shade of light brown as her eyes, long and wavy, the kind a man longed to touch just to see if it was as silky as it looked. Everything about her was soft and innocent in a way the women he knew weren’t. She’d been so pale in the night, making the blood stand out starkly on her cheeks and forehead. He’d seen a lot of terrible shit in his life, but that image disturbed him more than most. Perhaps because someone like Katie Foster was never meant to bleed like that, and knowing it had been his fault had him waking up at night in cold sweats.
That accident was churning up a f*ckload of posttraumatic stress.
Even if Chuito had assured him she was recovered, he couldn’t shake the guilt or the strange pang he got in his chest when he remembered how she’d actually been concerned about him that night. Even with painful injuries, she had been willing to cover for him, and it just furthered his determination to stay out of trouble once he got home. He didn’t want to run into another Katie Foster again, and he was officially tired of the fast lane. He could work hard, keep his nose to the grindstone, and stay out of trouble long enough for life to somehow forget guys like him weren’t designed to grow old and live off a pension.